Who so able to write a man's life as the living man himself? The age of intellect has merged into the autobiographical. A Homer is no longer wanting to immortalise an Agamemnon. For where is now the man not qualified to sing his own praise, to sound the trumpet of his own exploits—or who like myself would suffer the sad but instructive vicissitudes of his fate to pass by unwept and unrecorded, or, as Horace says, wrapped up in the darkness of a long and silent night—illacrymobiles? No! Having been promised a niche in Ross's Van Diemen's Land Annual, the only sanctuary and safe retreat of great names, the sole Westminster Abbey which these Australian regions can yet boast, I hasten to fill it up, before a greater man steps in to occupy the ground.

It is curious that the most important event of a man's life should ever rest upon secondary evidence. No one, however, will dispute the fact that I was born in the city of Copenhagen in the year 1780. My father, who was a mathematical instrument maker in good repute, sent me early to school, and, though I say it myself, I was no bad scholar. We have very good schools in Denmark, and the industry of the boys is stimulated by periodical rewards, which are distributed by the ministers of state.